


Turning Points

by englishsummerrain



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dance, M/M, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-07
Updated: 2019-07-07
Packaged: 2020-06-23 19:37:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,422
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19708063
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/englishsummerrain/pseuds/englishsummerrain
Summary: Renjun has always loved two things - dance, and Donghyuck.





	Turning Points

Strokes of gold spill in crooked lines across the floorboards, the sunset broken up by the bent blinds. Renjun leaps, swinging his arm upwards and using it to carry forward his motion, turning on a tight axis like a spinning top and hanging in the air for a split second. 

He lands gracefully on the balls of his feet, takes another step and pirouettes, jumping and skipping across the floor with steps that fall in time with every chord of the music. 

It’s the only sound. The thud, thud, thud, of bare feet on wood, of the floorboards creaking, of the song that causes him to fly if only for a second. The only thing he’s ever truly known.

“Was that good?” he asks, as the diminuendo falls across him. He wipes the beads of sweat that drip from his chin with the back of his hand, panting. The dust kicked up by the stomp of their feet is suspended in the light, punched through with cutouts that look like their shadows.

“Really good,” Donghyuck says.

“Do you think it’s good enough?”

Donghyuck looks out the window, through the bent blinds to the fading light reflected off the high rise buildings. “Yeah,” he says, nodding. He looks back at Renjun and seems infused with the sheen of the sunset. “We’ll kill it.”

Maybe it’s just the way he always looks to him. 

Renjun unscrews the cap from his bottle of water, and the song begins again.

Here’s how the world exists— 

  * The music, and how it possesses his body
  * Donghyuck
  * Everything else



(In that order)

Donghyuck’s favourite colour is red — the colour of his hair for the past eight months. Before, when they were high schoolers, when they were children, it was black as the buttons on his uniform shirt, but now he’s fire incarnate, a streak of molten heat where he runs ahead of Renjun, jumping on the rolling bridge and calling out for him to hurry up. The alarms sound and the warning light flashes, and Renjun hesitates, before breaking into a sprint, feet thundering against the metal, the winter night air whipping at his bare cheeks. He leaps onto the concrete at the other side and crashes into Donghyuck, who laughs with his whole body and throws his arms around him to catch him.

“Why do you always do that?” Renjun asks. The heat from the open and shut of the restaurant doors radiates across his back, joined by Donghyuck’s hand, worming its way under his jacket to sit at the base of his spine.

“Why not?”

Why not is Donghyuck’s answer to everything. He’s so free that Renjun envies him, like somehow he escaped being shackled to this Earth and that’s why he can fly so high.

His waist is narrow beneath Renjun’s hands when he lifts him into the air. Every muscle in Donghyuck’s abdomen tenses and Renjun’s arms burn, causing the landing to almost fail. Donghyuck rights himself and springs into his next move, fingers brushing Renjun’s hand, teeth flashing as he smiles.

“Almost dropped me,” he says. 

Renjun laughs. “You’ve put on weight.”

“You’ve gotten weaker.”

Renjun’s favourite colour is the way Donghyuck looks at him, a kaleidoscope of golds and silvers and every fraction of the rainbow the prism on his desk reflects when the sun hits it in the late afternoon.

He doesn’t know how to tell people this, so instead he just says he doesn’t have one.

“Can we have the heater back?”

Jeno has his flute in his hand, and there’s a girl standing behind him, her hands covered in the soft pink sleeves of her sweater. Sweat dries on the back of Renjun’s neck and runs in all the valleys of his body, along the paths that Donghyuck’s mouth had traced that morning.

“Sure,” Renjun says, pointing at where it sits against the wall. The two of them carry it out, Jeno holding his flute in his mouth as he wiggles out the door. When they disappear Donghyuck is standing behind them, holding a chocolate bar in his hands. He breaks it in half and hands the section with the wrapper to Renjun.

“You gave up the heater," he notes. There’s already chocolate smeared above his lip. Renjun reaches over and wipes it away with his thumb.

“We weren’t using it.”

“I lost the key to the music lab. We won’t get it back.”

“Then we’ll deal with it.”

Donghyuck shrugs and places the rest of the candy in his mouth. It makes his words sticky and his tongue heavy. “Tell me that tomorrow,” he says, sucking the chocolate off his fingers, “and then tell me I was right.”

  
  


He doesn't tell him, because Donghyuck already knows. Raindrops drip from the tips of his hair and splatter against the linoleum as he waits for the receptionist to come around to the front with the spare key. Renjun takes the heater and drags it back across the floor, thanking her as he squeezes past her.

When he comes back to the practice room, Donghyuck is silent, perched on the benches with his back to him. His reflection watches him drag the heater across the floor. When he plugs it in Donghyuck shuffles over, sits down beside him without a word and holds his hands up, allows the life to return to his sluggish body. Beyond the crooked blinds the rain bursts against the walls of the building.

“Do you think we’ll win?” Donghyuck asks, careful. It echoes in the empty practice room. Devoid of music the space seems so vast, like Renjun can't cross it in a few small movements, like somehow the notes falling around him fill the space

“Yes,” Renjun says. He doesn’t elaborate, and Donghyuck doesn’t ask. He just knows.

It’s hard for Renjun to love two things this much. He doesn’t know how to balance himself, even when they intersect like a thousand tiny vessels. 

Some days he feels like Donghyuck is a stranger to him, like all the love in his body has been bled dry, like he isn’t even sure how he was ever capable of wanting to move universes for someone who is reduced to a warmth in his bed.

More than anything, he worries Donghyuck has always loved him more. He worries that one day his love won’t be enough, and that they will crumble, when their bodies are old and can’t take this life anymore.

Donghyuck looks up at him from across the kitchen table, the light of his phone screen casting sickly shadows across his face. “What are you thinking about?” he asks.

Renjun shakes his head. “Nothing.”

Donghyuck’s eyes darken. The kitchen faucet leaks in a steady tempo, and a car honks its horn on the street far below. If he senses the lie, he doesn't mention it.

Donghyuck flies, and they place first.

Renjun clutches the trophy the entire bus ride back to their hotel, not letting it out of his sight even when Donghyuck asks to see it, despite the fact it’s as much his as it is Renjun’s. They earned this together, they flew together. The sunset across the city is like burnished gold and ripe peaches and shades that Renjun never learned the name for, and he leans on the glass, letting the pinpricks of light burn splotches in the corners of his vision. Donghyuck’s hand is warm in his, his body turned away as he talks to their coach. Renjun is happy to let him be the centre of attention.

The victory is the crescendo, the turning point of this chapter in his life. When they get back to their hotel room Renjun throws the trophy in the sink, where it clatters amongst the dirty plates and unrinsed cutlery. Donghyuck stares at it, for maybe a second too long, before his gaze returns to Renjun.

“It meant that much to you?” 

There’s an iridescence to him, like every part of him Renjun had ever touched is glowing, a light that reaches right down to the core of his bones and floods every chamber of his heart.

“No,” Renjun says. He’s not sure what he’s doing. This is the part of his life that has no choreography. This is the part of his life that isn’t set to a backing track, that doesn’t exist on top of a stage and the way the music carries him. 

Donghyuck kisses him. The sun sets behind the half-drawn curtains and shadows of the clouds, and, without direction, Renjun dances.

**Author's Note:**

> honestly, i am still unsure what i was trying to do here. regardless, i hope you enjoyed. much love to anyone who reads, as always.
> 
> catch me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/dongrenle) or [cc](https://curiouscat.me/goldhorn).


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